Shadow Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Some people seemed to get all sunshine, and some all shadow…

Louisa May Alcott

The existence of illness in the body may no doubt be called a shadow of the true illness which is held by man in his mind.

Love, it's such a night, laced with running water, irreparable, riddled with a million leaks. A night shaped like a shadow thrown by your absence. Every crack trickles, every overhang drips. The screech of nighthawks has been replaced by the splash of rain. The rain falls from the height of streetlights. Each drop contains its own shattering blue bulb.

Then fell upon the house a sudden gloom, a shadow on those features fair and thin. And softly, from the hushed and darkened room, two angels issued, where but one went in.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

History is full of people who thought they were right — absolutely right, completely right, without a shadow of a doubt. And because history never seems like history when you are living through it, it is tempting for us to think the same.

But youth is as a flowing stream, on whose current the shadow may rest but not remain.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

To get past your ego and its defenses you need to get quiet, be brave, and listen to your inner voices....When you embrace the messages of each aspect of your shadow, you begin to take back the power you've given to others and form a bond of trust with your authentic self. The voices of your unembraced qualities, when allowed into your consciousness, will bring you back into balance and harmony with your natural rhythms.

And he continued to travesty the truth, and I was impotent — the truth, that profound thing whose voice was in my ears, whose shadow was in my eyes, and whose taste was in my mouth.
Was I so utterly forsaken? Would no one speak the word I was in search of?

The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us; visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower;
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,
Like memory of music fled,
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Know, my son, that the enemy will always be with you. He will be in the shadow of your dreams and in your living flesh, for he is the other part of yourself.

I see that all of us who live are nothing but images or insubstantial shadow.

In a process that had begun in the 1980s and suddenly accelerated in the early 2000s... the peaks of great wealth grew higher, rising up beyond the clouds, while the valleys of poverty sank lower into perpetual shadow. The once broad plateau of the middle class eroded away into a narrow ledge, with the white-knuckled occupants holding on for dear life.

Barbara Ehrenreich

What I think is this: You should give up looking for lost cats and start searching for the other half of your shadow.

Haruki Murakami

Truly great people emit a light that warms the hearts of those around them. When that light has been put out, a heavy shadow of despair descends.

Banana Yoshimoto

It's a Catholic idea, actually—that the material world is redeemed; that time is continuous; that one can somehow be redeemed by the faith of an earlier age or a poorer class, if one lives within its shadow or its arrondissement or breathes its sigh.

Richard Rodriguez

There is no shadow of protection to be had by sheltering behind the slender stockades of visionary speculation, or by hiding behind the wagon-wheels of pacific theories.

Man is a torch borne in the wind; a dream
But of a shadow, summed with all his substance.

A shadow strolled past the car, indifferent to our curbside melodrama. This was my second time imperiled in a a parked vehicle in the space of three hours. I wondered what goonish spectacles I'd overlooked in my own career as a pavement walker.

Jonathan Lethem

Error is transient; truth alone is eternal. Error is only the shadow cast by truth, when its rays are arrested on their path by human ignorance and intellectual opacity.

Justus von Liebig

To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.

Jean Baudrillard

Christ's crucifixion was on a hill, by a road, where everybody who passed by could not only see his pain, but also his shame. It was not done in a shadow, hidden away somewhere.

Francis Schaeffer

I know this may sound strange to some, but about the only positive thing one can say about filters is that the function of every filter is negative; it subtracts a part of the light, holds back certain of the rays in the rainbow of colors. All that a filter does is to convert a part of the object light to image shadow.

The sea can bind us to her many moods, whispering to us by the subtle token of a shadow or a gleam upon the waves, and hinting in these ways of her mournfulness or rejoicing. Always she is remembering old things, and these memories, though we may not grasp them, are imparted to us, so that we share her gaiety or remorse.

H. P. Lovecraft

Daddy grips the wheel and stares alone into the distance
He knows that something somewhere has to break
He sees the family home now, looming in his headlights
The pain upstairs that makes his eyeballs ache
Many miles away there's a shadow on the door
Of a cottage on the shore
Of a dark Scottish lake

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow.